Inheriting Abraham: The Legacy of the Patriarch in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

INHERITING ABRAHAM

LIBRARY OF JEWISH IDEAS

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The series presents engaging and authoritative treatments of core Jewish concepts in a form appealing to general readers who are curious about Jewish treatments of key areas of human thought and experience.

INHERITING ABRAHAM

THE LEGACY OF THE PATRIARCH IN JUDAISM, CHRISTIANITY, AND ISLAM

Jon D. Levenson

P R I N C E T O N   U N I V E R S I T Y   P R E S S

Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2012 by Princeton University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Levenson, Jon Douglas.

Inheriting Abraham : the legacy of the patriarch in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam / Jon D. Levenson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-15569-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Abraham (Biblical patriarch) 2. Abraham (Biblical patriarch)—In rabbinical literature. 3. Bible. O.T. Genesis—Criticism, interpretation, etc. 4. Abraham (Biblical patriarch) in the New Testament. 5. Abraham (Biblical patriarch)—In the Koran. I. Title.

BS580.A3L483 2012

222′.11092—dc23     2012013158

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Publication of this book has been aided by the Tikvah Fund

This book has been composed in Minion Pro

Printed on acid-free paper ∞

Printed in the United States of America

10  9  8  7  6  5  4

For Lila Ruth Levenson and Eliana Rose Levenson, two new daughters of Abraham

¹Listen to Me, you who pursue justice,

You who seek the LORD:

Look back to the rock from which you were hewn,

To the quarry from which you were dug.

²Look back to Abraham your father

And to Sarah who brought you forth.

For he was only one person when I called him,

But I blessed him and made him many. (Isa 51:1–2)¹

Contents

Acknowledgments

A Note on Transliteration from Hebrew

Abbreviations

INTRODUCTION • Who Was (and Is) Abraham?

CHAPTER ONE • Call and Commission

CHAPTER TWO • Frustrations and Fulfillments

CHAPTER THREE • The Test

CHAPTER FOUR • The Rediscovery of God

CHAPTER FIVE • Torah or Gospel?

CHAPTER SIX • One Abraham or Three?

Notes

Index of Primary Sources

Index of Modern Authors

Acknowledgments

THE SUBJECT OF THIS BOOK is the biblical narratives about Abraham and their appropriation into Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, with the major emphasis falling on the Jewish material. It is a subject on which I have lectured for more than three decades, not only in my own classrooms but also in colleges, universities, seminaries, conferences, synagogues, churches, clergy associations, and interreligious gatherings too numerous to list here. I am thankful not only to those who have hosted me but also to all those who have sharpened and expanded my thinking with their questions and suggestions. The students at Harvard who have taken the seminars I have offered on various aspects of the subject over the years have, needless to say, helped me greatly. My one regret in this connection is the number of topics addressed in those seminars (such as Abraham as apocalyptic seer and as culture hero) that could not receive proper treatment in a book with the comparative focus and limitations of length of this one.

A number of scholars read all or parts of my manuscript at various stages or otherwise responded graciously and learnedly to my inquiries. I owe special thanks to Ellen Birnbaum, Diana Lobel, Kevin Madigan, Laura Nasrallah, David Powers, Michael Pregill, Bernard Septimus, Suzanne Smith, and Andrew Teeter. I must also thank the two anonymous readers whom Princeton University Press engaged for helping me avoid some mistakes and misstatements. Needless to say, I alone am responsible for the errors that remain.

Two expert editors were also of invaluable assistance. Neal Kozodoy, the creator of the Library of Jewish Ideas, was enormously helpful to me at every stage; the beneficial effects of his renowned editorial acumen can be seen throughout the book. Fred Appel of Princeton University Press also proved consistently helpful and accommodating, as did three other individuals associated with the Press, Sarah David, Beth Clevenger, and my expert copyeditor, Cathy Slovensky.

I did much of the work for this volume during research leaves from Harvard Divinity School, to which I am therefore grateful. My work would have been vastly harder were it not for my faculty assistant, Felicia Share, and the research assistants with whom I have been blessed in recent years, Maria Metzler, Keith Stone, Mary Ruth Windham, and Jonathan Kaplan.

All translations from the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament in this book are taken from Tanakh, except for those cited within an excerpt from another source. (Reprinted from the Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1985 The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia.) Unless otherwise noted, the quotations from the New Testament and the Apocrypha that appear herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible. (Copyright © 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.) All translations from the Qu’ran are taken from An Interpretation of the Qu’ran: English Translation of the Meanings, translated by Majid Fakhry (Washington Square, N.Y.: New York University Press, 2000. © courtesy of Garnet Publishing Ltd.). An earlier version of chapter 5 was first published by Marquette University Press as Abraham between Torah and Gospel: The Père Marquette Lecture in Theology 2011, vol. 42. Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Marquette University Press, 2011. http://www.marquette.edu/mupress/PM2011Levenson.shtml. A brief form of chapter 6 can be found in The Idea of Abrahamic Religions: A Qualified Dissent, Jewish Review of Books. (Used by permission of the Jewish Review of Books.)

A Note on Transliteration from Hebrew

THIS IS A BOOK WRITTEN for both general and scholarly readers. Some of the general readers will have knowledge of Hebrew, and some will not. The former and perhaps even the latter will be interested on occasion in knowing the key Hebrew words that are the focus of discussions. Scholarly readers, or at least those in the fields of Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies, will have the same interest. The goal, then, is to present Hebrew terms in a way that is accessible to both sets of readers. To do this, I have refrained from providing scientific transliteration, with all its diacritical marks that so confuse and frustrate the nonspecialist. I trust my fellow specialists will forgive my foray into accessible communication.

Alephs and ayins are used throughout the book. Neither consonant is pronounced in the Ashkenazic tradition or by large numbers of speakers of Modern Hebrew, perhaps most. For those with some knowledge of Hebrew, I simply note that aleph is rendered as ’ but ayin as ‘. As for the consonant vav, which was once pronounced like the English w (hence, scholars sometimes call it waw), in this book it appears as a v, the way it is almost always pronounced in Modern Hebrew. That is also the way the letter bet sounds when it is aspirated and thus called vet, and so it, too, appears as v.

Two other consonants, also once distinguished, that today are generally pronounced identically, include kaf and qof. Here, following convention, the first is rendered as k and the second as q. Sometimes kaf is aspirated so that it sounds like the ch in the German Bach. When that is the case, many Jews (including many Israelis) today articulate it exactly as they do another letter, chet. To avoid confusion, I render chet as ch and the aspirated kaf (or khaf) as kh. The letters samekh and sin, similarly once but no longer distinguished in pronunciation, I render respectively, as s . Tet and tav), and the latter always as a simple t. The letter tsadi appears here as ts, just as it is usually pronounced today. I have not employed diacritics with Hebrew vowels, trusting that here, too, any confusion that might result will be negligible.

Abbreviations

BOOKS OF THE HEBREW BIBLE

BOOKS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

ANCIENT JEWISH WORKS (OTHER THAN THE HEBREW BIBLE)

OTHER ABBREVIATIONS

INHERITING ABRAHAM

INTRODUCTION

Who Was (and Is) Abraham?

On the day when Our Father Abraham passed away from the world, all the great people of the nations of the world stood in a line and said, Alas for the world that has lost its leader, and alas for the ship that has lost its pilot!

—Talmud¹

THE OLDEST SOURCE for the story of Abraham is in the biblical book of Genesis, where it occupies about fourteen chapters, or roughly twenty pages. Readers who are unfamiliar with the story would be well advised to read it now, and in a modern, accessible translation.² When they do, they will see that it is the deceptively simple tale of a person to whom God, suddenly and without preparation, makes some rather extravagant promises. This childless man (whose wife is infertile) is to be the father of a great nation; he will become famous and blessed, in fact a source or byword of blessing for many; and his descendants will be given the land of Canaan, to which he is commanded to journey, leaving his homeland in Mesopotamia (today, Iraq) and his family of origin behind. Much of the drama in these early chapters of the story derives from the question, how will this man whose wife has never been able to conceive a child and is now advancing in years ever beget the great nation that is at the center of the promise? The wealth associated with that promise comes quickly, but the son who will be Abraham’s heir and continuator does not, and this casts into doubt both the reliability of the promise and the God who made it.

When at long last Abraham does gain a son, it is not through his primary wife, but, at her suggestion, through an Egyptian slave who serves as a surrogate mother for her mistress. The resolution is short-lived. For no sooner is Abraham’s ostensible heir (Ishmael) born than God makes the astounding promise that the infertile wife, Sarah, now eighty-nine years old, will give birth to the promised son after all, and that this son will inherit not only the promises of blessing and great nationhood, as does Ishmael, but, unlike Ishmael, the covenant as well. Much of the second half of the story of Abraham focuses on the relationship of these two sons (and that of their mothers as well), until finally Ishmael and his mother Hagar are removed from the household and Hagar procures an Egyptian wife for her son, confirming, as it were, the divine prediction that his would not be Abraham’s prime lineage. That status has been reserved for Sarah’s son Isaac, who is born not through the course of nature but through nothing less than a miracle. But this time, too, the happy resolution is short-lived, for soon after it is established that Sarah’s son Isaac is the promised offspring, God again, suddenly and without warning, commands Abraham to sacrifice this child, the son he loves and on whom he has staked his life, as a burnt offering on an as-yet-unspecified mountain in a distant land.

And yet, once again, Abraham obeys God’s inscrutable will. At the last minute, God interrupts the sacrifice, having determined that Abraham obeys even when that means acting against his own self-interest and paternal love. Isaac survives. Abraham, before he dies, succeeds in buying a gravesite for Sarah, his only acquisition of real estate in the land promised his descendants. He also arranges a marriage for Isaac within his extended family back in Mesopotamia, ensuring that the promise will not die in his generation but extend into the next, as Isaac and Rebekah succeed Abraham and Sarah as the progenitors of the special nation. The promise secured—and to some extent realized—Abraham passes away at a ripe old age, contented.

So much for Abraham in the Jewish Bible, the subject of our first two chapters and part of the third (and to be treated at greater length later in this introduction). What is too easily missed is that in the Jewish tradition, the Bible comes bundled with a rich body of interpretation that has grown over many centuries. This makes it inadequate to restrict a discussion of Abraham in Judaism to the figure who appears in Genesis. Rather, the story continued to grow even after the biblical texts became fixed, and expanded versions of the story in Genesis—along with some that seem to have no or only slight rooting there—became plentiful among Jews living under various forms of Greek or Roman domination. In fact, as Judaism changed under the impact of fresh challenges and resources, the conception of Abraham changed as well. Much richer and more variegated portraits of him emerge, along with new conceptions of his significance and his legacy. The evolution of the figure of Abraham in Jewish sources reflects the evolution of Judaism itself over the centuries.

In the Jewish tradition, Abraham is known as ’Avraham ’Avinu, Our Father Abraham. As the father of the Jewish people, he is not simply their biological progenitor (and, as the tradition would have it, the father of all who have converted to Judaism as well); he is also the founder of Judaism itself—the first Jew, as it were—and the man whose life in some mysterious ways pre-enacts the experience of the Jewish people, who are his descendants and who are to walk in trails he blazed. The major way in which they are to do so is by serving and worshipping the God whom, according to those postbiblical but still authoritative traditions, Abraham rediscovered. To this day, the Jewish liturgy speaks of God as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, referring in the last two phrases to the special son and grandson through whom, according to the biblical narrative, the Jewish people came into existence.

That Abraham should have assumed such prominence is more than a little surprising, and for at least two reasons. The first is that so little of what the tradition instructs Jews to practice can be found in the biblical narratives about Abraham. Neither he nor anyone else in Genesis, for example, observes the Sabbath (Shabbat), a central focus of Jewish life from antiquity till the present. True, God ceases (Hebrew, shavat) from his labors on the seventh day of creation, but, as the Torah’s story has it, he does not disclose Shabbat itself or command any human beings to keep it until the time of Moses, long after the death of Abraham. The same can be said about the great bulk of the commandments of the Torah. The opposition to idolatry and the insistence on the one God who has created the world, the characteristic ethical and legal norms, the laws governing sacrificial worship, the dietary laws, the festivals—Abraham is involved with none of these, the single, glaring exception being circumcision. But in time all this changes, as Abraham the father becomes Abraham the founder as well—the man who heroically stands up for the one invisible and transcendent God, who created the world, guides and governs it through his providence, and gave the Torah and its commandments to the Jewish people.

To historians, this postbiblical reconception of Abraham as the founder of Judaism is, of course, problematic, and not simply because it fails to reflect the earliest surviving sources about him. To the modern historian, the whole concept of a single person founding a great religion is too simplistic to account for the complex cultural and social dynamics by which any religious tradition comes into being. There is ample room to reject the notions, for example, that the tradition Westerners call Confucianism was founded by Confucius and that Christianity was founded by the man its adherents called Jesus Christ (who was, in fact, an observant Jew). In both those cases, however, the putative founder is revered and viewed as a paradigm for the adherents to follow, and no later figure in the tradition even begins to equal him. The same can be said for the Buddha and Muhammad. Abraham as he appears in the Torah is arguably (but not indisputably) presented as worthy of reverence, but little of what he is reported to have done is directly amenable to imitation. On the basis of the biblical traditions, if the problematic title of founder must be invoked at all, Moses would seem to have a much better claim to it than Abraham.

This brings us to the second reason that the reconception of Abraham in Jewish tradition is surprising. It is not simply that in Genesis, Abraham does not teach what Moses is said to have taught; it is that he does not teach anything at all. In this, too, he distinguishes himself radically from other putative founder-figures, like the Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, and Muhammad. Genesis, like the entire Jewish Bible, is extraordinarily reticent about providing editorial evaluations of Abraham. The same reticence also partly accounts for the occasional willingness of the Jewish tradition to find serious fault with Abraham.³ In this, too, Judaism seems radically different from the way most religious traditions treat their founders, who are regarded as models for emulation and, in the case of orthodox Christianity, as the very incarnation of God himself.

In the later part of the Second Temple period (roughly 200 B.C.E.–70 C.E.), when the latest compositions in the Hebrew Bible were being finished, Judaism faced one of those challenges to its conception of Abraham alluded to above and found the resources to deal with it. The challenge lay in the advance of scientific thinking in the Greco-Roman world and the philosophical claims on behalf of naturalism with which it was associated. In particular, the discovery of mathematically predictable regularities inscribed in the motion of the heavenly bodies posed a formidable challenge to the traditional Jewish belief in a personal God who created the world (including the planets and stars) and actively governs it through his providence. As we shall see in , chapter 4, one way in which Judaism sought to meet the new challenge was by finding in Abraham the man who had seen through astrology/astronomy (the two were not yet distinguished) and discovered the God who is above nature and not wholly immanent in it or constrained by it. The traditional absence of an icon of the Deity in Jewish worship lent itself to making a similar point. Whereas in the Abraham narratives of Genesis, there is no notion at all of idolatry or of false gods, late Second Temple Jewish literature exhibits an Abraham who, strikingly, not only intuits the noncorporeal nature of God but also sets himself courageously against the regnant idolatry. In the manner of biblical prophets like Elijah and Jeremiah, or of Jewish martyrs of the late Second Temple period itself, this Abraham is willing to witness to the highest truth with, if need be, his very life. This idea of Abraham’s uncompromising opposition to idolatry carries over into rabbinic and later Jewish sources; it is familiar to many Jews today, some of whom are surprised to learn that there is not a word to that effect in Genesis. Appearing prominently in the Qur’an as well, it becomes an important part of the common heritage of Judaism and Islam.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are often described as the monotheistic religions, meaning those that insist there is but one God (though the one God of Christian tradition is believed to exist in three equally divine persons). Although in the Middle Ages the oneness of God becomes a focus of important philosophical reflection, monotheism among the Jews of biblical, Second Temple, and rabbinic times (the last period runs roughly from about 70 C.E. to 500 C.E.) was not focused primarily on the number of deities but on the transcendence of the true God over nature and humankind, which are his handiwork and ultimately dependent upon him and his generosity. Importantly, there was also a pagan monotheism in the Greco-Roman world (pagan in this usage is not derogatory but simply designates someone whose identity did not in any way derive from ancient Israel). But the one God in whom the Stoic philosophers believed, to use them as an example, was not the creator of the world and did not transcend the natural order, as did the creator God of the Jews and the Christians (and later, the Muslims). At least just as important is the crucial fact, too often overlooked, that Jewish, Christian, and Muslim monotheism focuses not only on the one God but also on the special human community to whom he has graciously revealed himself and his will in sacred scripture—another aspect unparalleled in pagan (or, philosophical) monotheism.

In the context of Judaism, one thus cannot speak very long or very adequately about God without speaking about the people Israel, the people descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; conversely, one cannot speak very long or very adequately about the people Israel without speaking about the God of Israel. Something analogous can be said about Christianity and Islam, but not about pagan monotheism. In Second Temple and rabbinic tradition, Abraham is not just the man who rediscovered the one God; he is also, as in the Hebrew Bible, the forefather of the Jewish people, who, like him, are witnesses to that God.

The rise of Christianity in the first century of the Common Era posed a different sort of challenge to Judaism and elicited a different sort of response. In this case, the central issue was twofold: Which community today can lay just claim to the promises made to Abraham’s descendants, and what is that community obligated to practice? For the Christian apostle Paul, Abraham was the father of all who have faith without being circumcised and who thus have righteousness reckoned to them, and likewise the father of the circumcised who are not only circumcised but who also follow the example of the faith that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised (Rom 4:11–12).⁴ Here, the key thing is not birth but faith, and Gentiles and Jews—the uncircumcised and the circumcised—qualify equally for descent from Abraham if they have faith. That Abraham lived before Moses’s reception of the Torah and, according to Genesis, was pronounced righteous by God because of his faith proved to Paul, himself once a practicing Jew, that the commandments of the Torah were not necessary for a right relationship with God.

Even the mitsvah (commandment) of ritual circumcision, which Abraham and his descendants were categorically commanded to practice, was no exception, for, as Paul sees it, Abraham was pronounced righteous because of his faith before that commandment was ever given.⁵ And so, ritual circumcision, a requirement for men converting to Judaism, would not be required of Christians at all. The faith of Abraham the Gentile made him righteous in God’s eyes even before circumcision made him into Abraham the first Jew. In Paul’s theology, the community for which Abraham served as a paradigm was thus a mixed group of Gentiles and Jews, a community created by God and founded upon faith in the gospel of Christ crucified and risen from the dead. It was, in other words, the Church, and so it remains in the minds of most Christians to this day.

The precise innovation brought about by the Jewish response to Paul’s and kindred early Christian theologies is difficult to establish, since we cannot easily distinguish between a response to a Christian challenge and the natural unfolding of Jewish theology and biblical interpretation. (The current Jewish Bible, give or take a few books, was the only Bible the earliest Christians knew.) A good case in point is the issue of the dispensability of ritual circumcision for men of Abrahamic descent. When the Talmudic sages, who refer to the circumcision ceremony as inducting the boy into the covenant of Abraham Our Father, also devised a liturgy that proclaims, Were it not for the blood of circumcision, heaven and earth would not endure! (Babylonian Talmud [b.], Shabbat [Shab.] 137b), were they responding to the contrary Christian theology; to long-standing, in fact pre-Christian, Gentile contempt for the practice; to the great emphasis the Torah itself places upon the ritual; or to some combination of these three possibilities? Whatever the answer, it is certainly the case that the rabbis refused to dispense with circumcision or to subordinate it or the rest of the mitsvot (commandments) of the Torah to faith.

Indeed, in a number of places in rabbinic literature, we find Abraham practicing other mitsvot as well, even those undisclosed until after his death. Thus, a rabbinic text reports, we find that Our Father Abraham practiced the whole Torah, in its entirety, before it was given (Mishnah [m.] Qiddushin 14:4). It is tempting to view this as a response to Paul’s insistence that the case of Abraham shows the Torah and its commandments are not necessary and that it is faith that determines who belongs to the people of God and who does not. This may well be so, though, as we shall see in chapter 5, the idea that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob observed the Mosaic Torah is also pre-Christian. The rabbis continued this idea but did not originate it. They also challenged it on occasion.

Islam (which arose in the seventh century C.E.) focuses on Abraham more than does either Judaism or Christianity.⁶ Like Christianity, it seeks to detach Abraham from the flesh-and-blood Jewish people. But there is an extremely important difference between the Christian and the Muslim cases. Christianity has historically taught that descent from Abraham is essential; it differs from Judaism in holding that one becomes a descendant of Abraham through Christian faith and not through natural birth as a Jew or conversion to Judaism. Islam, on the other hand, beginning in the Qur’an itself, has taught that descent is insignificant. Abraham, in other words, is not the father of the believing community—neither Our Father Abraham nor the father of all who have faith—but rather a link in the chain of prophets that begins with Adam and culminates in the greatest of all prophets, Muhammad. As we shall see in chapter 6, the Qur’an conceives of Abraham as submitted to God (Arabic, muslim) and believes that those worthy of him are the followers of the man he foreshadowed, Muhammad, Seal of the prophets (33:40).⁷ Alongside Abraham the Jew and Abraham the Christian (or at least the man who foreshadowed Christian faith), we thus must also reckon with Abraham the Muslim, or, to put the same point differently, with the Muslim claim that Islam is the restoration of the religion of Abraham (Qur’an 2:135), a religion long distorted and misinterpreted by Jews and Christians alike.

Given these conflicting interpretations of the supposedly common figure, the claim that Abraham is a source of reconciliation among the three traditions increasingly called Abrahamic is as simplistic as it is now widespread. Historically, Abraham has functioned much more as a point of differentiation among the three religious communities than as a node of commonality. The assumption that we can recover a neutral Abraham that is independent of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—yet authoritative over them—is, as we shall see in chapter 6, quite unwarranted. Any argument that the Abraham of one of these three religions is the real Abraham will necessarily be fatally circular and privilege the scriptures and traditions of the very religion it seeks to validate. Thus, our concentration on the Jewish Abraham in this book implies no claim that the rival Abrahams of Christianity and Islam lack a parallel integrity of their own. On the contrary, the distinctive character of Abraham in Judaism—and to a large degree the distinctive character of Judaism